If you’re new here, let me give you a little snapshot of
what was going on with me one year ago: I had been married to my best friend
for just a little over six months, I was in a new non-academic career for a
little over seven months, I recently defended my Master’s thesis project and
graduated from my graduate school program, I started repaying my student loans,
and I proclaimed that I was showing “symptoms of ‘adulting’.” All in all, it
likely appeared to the casual observer that I had my life together, more or
less.
The truth is that I was in a pretty dark place one year ago.
Despite the relative stability of my life and how grateful I was for said
stability, I felt surprisingly lost. I’m a millennial, so I am used to never
being truly satisfied with anything in my life, but this time it was different.
This time I knew that I should not be
feeling so lost. I knew I should just be grateful for what I had. I knew I
should be satisfied with the way my life had turned out so far.
The problem, of course, was that aside from being married, I
wasn’t satisfied. Despite the life I had and despite all of the wonderful
opportunities I’d had, I felt empty. I couldn’t get the following pestering,
infuriating, consuming thought out of my head:
Is this it for me?
To provide some additional context, I had been in academia
for 22 years of my life by the time I graduated from my Master’s program and
found myself writing the first blog post for (ryan)vention. All I knew up to
that point was academia. All I had ever worked for was to further advance
through the world of academia. All I had worked for up to that point was the
next assignment or the next paper or the next test or the next grade and,
ultimately, the next celebration for my academic efforts.
In sum, I’d become a bit of a snowflake.
Sure, I had worked multiple part- (and let’s be honest,
basically full- with no benefits) jobs since I was 16. I’d had internships. I’d
been involved in a whole slew of co-curricular activities. But they were always
in the moment. I knew none of the part/full-time jobs or internships or
co-curricular activities were permanent in my life. They all served to get me to
where I was ultimately going, wherever that was.
Imagine my surprise when graduation came and all I felt was
emptiness. In retrospect, it makes sense. I was leaving the only real
institution I had ever known – the one that came with all the assignments and
papers and tests and grades and degrees and part-/full-time jobs and
internships and co-curricular activities and celebrating – and I was entering
the first truly unknown phase of my life. There was no plan. I was married. I
had a job. I was paying my bills. I was adulting. I had, “accepted that the best version of myself was the one holding a family
size bag of Cheetos in my left hand and a ‘sharing’ size bottle of
chardonnay in my right while watching Chelsea Handler and Amy Schumer
(#SquadGoals) reruns with three dozen cats sitting on and around my person and
managing Grizabella's social media accounts” (actual quote from very first
blog entry). But my life had been planned out for me by the world of academia
up until December 2015. After that, it was my turn to plan out my own life. You’d
think I’d be up to the task after spending so much time in an institution that taught
me to think for myself, but at the time I felt totally unequipped to do so.
I wasn’t fun to be around at this time last year – you can
tell up through my Pad Thai Meltdown – four months into (ryan)vention – that I
was zero fun to be around. I was down on myself for the loss of my writing. I
was down on myself for my weight gain. I was down on myself for having a
baditude (which only increased said baditude). I was even down on an innocent
book that never did anything to me (but, truly, The Birthing House was the worst book I read in 2016 and maybe my
entire life – bad enough that it gave me hopes of one day being published
because, if that garbage book could get published, then surely I could get
published – but I digress).
Truly, the source of this no-fun me and the most important
thing to note about this time last year is that I wasn’t working toward
anything.
I had toyed with the idea of creating and maintaining a blog
for a while before this one came to fruition. Craig and I maintained one
(kinda) through our engagement and wedding planning process, but once the
wedding happened the blog seemed a little pointless. I tried keeping a few
through both high school and undergrad, but I always ended up deleting them. Be
it the unrealistic expectations, the constant internal battles of thinking that
what I have to say doesn’t matter, the struggle to balance having a creative outlet
and wanting the gratification of having people read and enjoy it, or just
making a laundry list of excuses or “better things to do” – maintaining a blog
was something I never thought I would be able to do. Looking back now, I think
it was less to do with all of those insecurities and more to do with the fact
that it was never the right time. But it
was the aforementioned realization that I wasn’t working toward anything that ultimately
created what you’re reading today: I needed to set a course for myself to find
my next “thing” – my next macguffin. So that’s what I have been doing.
(ryan)vention saved me. ~So MeLoDrAmAtIc~
I like to think we’ve had some good times this year. Full
disclosure, I am shamelessly linking to previous posts (my personal favorites)
from the last year “in case you missed ‘em”:
- Yankee Candle here, here, and here
- Fake Patrick’s Day
- A Crossroads conspiracy theory
- Manual Labor
- Stories from not a child prodigy/third author of a textbook
- Pokemon Go
- Learning about sportsball
The person desperately trying to figure out what to do next
with himself is a stranger to me now. I don’t want to ever feel that lost
again. Call it a quarter-life crisis. Call it an existential crisis. Call it
being a snowflake. Whatever it was, it propelled me to do and be better. I’m
happier now than I’ve ever been before. I’m writing more than I’ve ever
written. I’m happy. And that pretty much sums it up.
It's hard to believe that it's been a year since I started this blog. Thank you for making this year a successful one, dear
readers, and for staying with me through this adventure (no matter how
irregular or infrequent the content may be). I am looking forward to what comes
next, and sharing those moments with all of you.
To the adventure.
– Ryan
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